7 Twitter Plugins to Power Up your WordPress Blog

WordPress bloggers are always crazy about plugins, and with so many Twitter plugins to choose, which ones are good and free? There are easily hundreds of Twitter plugins on WP Plugin Directory, but below are 7 selected and recommended plugins that can bring you more traffic, engage with your blog readers and Twitter followers, and make your blog more “twitter-friendly” to gear up your efforts on Twitter marketing. There are desktop applications and online tools that we can use too, but that will covered in another post.

1. TweetMeme Retweet Button

Trusted even by big compaines such as Techcrunch.com, CNET.com, Wired, and Time Magzine, you will be silly not to take a look at this plugin. The Tweetmeme button is a wonderful to engage with your readers and serves as an indicator on what your visitors like, or which topics are hotcakes and can go viral. Adds a button which easily lets your readers retweet your blog posts. maybe the most important plugin to help your blog go viral on Twitter.

There’s a live count on the number of times your post has been retweeted (RT) too. Finetune the options by editing custom titles, adding hashtags (taken from your post tags), and using URL shorteners. Get it here.

2. Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates a complete integration between your blog and Twitter account. Everytime you published a new post, a tweet will be made too. Customization can be made on the Tweet Prefix for your new blog posts, and you can create a new blog post out of your tweets too. However, I don’t find the latter useful for my uses. Same as most of the twitter plugins, hashtags can be added to your regular or weekly tweets updates.

3. WP to Twitter

The plugin auto tweets whenever a new post is made on your WordPress blog. It comes with a generic Tweet template, but you can modify the template according to your wants. Shortcodes can be used, and include #title#, #blog#, #post#, #category#, etc.

Extra features include: using your WordPress tags as hashtags, tracking with Google Analytics, and support for XMLRPC remote clients. Users can choose their own preferred URL shortener. Default is Su.pr.

4. Twitter Embed

What the plugin does is very simple, embed tweets into your posts and pages, the way you embed Youtubes to posts. For users who already have a big presence on Twitter, or want to engage readers further, you shouldn’t miss it. All the links embeded are active, and the reader can reply, retweet, favorite and even follow. No configuration required. Plugin and play, more details here!

5. TwitPic

For photography, food, travel or photo-intensive blogs, you can use this plugin to show case your latest pictures from TwitPic on your blog’s sidebar. The plugin comes with many configuration options incluing the number of images to display, the widget and image width, showing a link to your Twitter profile below the widget, and more here.

6. Twitter Mentions as Comments

The Twitter WordPress plugin searches Twitter for tweeple (abbv) that mention about your posts, and automatically inserts those tweets into that particular post as comments. The plugin builds on WordPress commenting system, so no worries about incompatibilty.

Regardless of what URL shortener you are using, the plugin is able to find the Tweet that mentions your post (URL). You have options to automatically exclude Rts, which posts to check (the most recents, all posts, or front page only), and the ability to store the tweets as trackbacks/pingbacks. Everything happens in the background, and smart catching of tweets & data makes its almost too good for the plugin to be free. Download here.

7. Tweet Old Post

While many Twitter plugins publish tweets on your latest posts. This plugin is designed to tweet your older posts, giving them more exposure and getting more traffic. Based on the interval specified by you, it randomly selects older posts and tweet about them. You can customize and add hashtags from your tags or categories for the tweets too. Start tweeting and reviving your old posts. More on the plugin.